Speakers
Want to learn new things on front-end and UX? Aching for fresh inspiration and learning new skills? Let our speakers help and inspire you.
Our speakers and workshop teachers are the best in their fields, and they love to share what they know, how they work and what drives them. Let our speakers and teachers help and inspire you. On top of that, they are all smashingly nice.
We plan to announce our first speakers soon. Stay updated on the latest speakers and topics via our newsletter or follow us on Twitter.
Our speakers rarely show slides: they show how they work — their setup, workflows and techniques for getting work done in live interactive sessions. So expect everything from refactoring and debugging to sketching and redesign, live.
Manuel Matuzović
Manuel Matuzović is a front-end developer who's passionate about HTML and CSS. He works for the City of Vienna where he builds accessible frontends and assesses the quality of sites built by others. He's a certified accessibility expert, auditor, teacher and consultant. He writes about accessibility, HTML, and CSS on his personal blog matuzo.at and htmhell.dev.
- Talk
- Lost in Translation
- On the web
- https://matuzo.at
Sophie Tahran
Sophie currently leads up UX writing for The New Yorker at Condé Nast. (She’s still working on winning the Cartoon Caption Contest, though.) Past lives include establishing a UX writing practice at InVision and wearing many hats at Lyft.
- Talk
- Designing with Words
- On the web
- https://www.sophietahran.com
Ivan Akulov
Ivan is a Google Developer Expert, web performance consultant, and full-stack software engineer. His web performance experience has helped hot startups and Fortune 500 companies like Google, Framer, and Appsmith. He currently runs the web performance consulting agency PerfPerfPerf.
Outside of work, Ivan has been digital-nomading since mid-2020. He enjoys exploring modern art, discovering lesser-known electronic and techno artists, and obsessing over serif typefaces.
- Talk
- React 18 Concurrency, Explained
- On the web
- https://iamakulov.com
Nathan Curtis
Nathan co-founded EightShapes with Dan Brown in 2006. He’s passionate about information architecture, UX, front-end dev, and leads design systems consulting at EightShapes. He wrote Modular Web Design in 2009, blogs frequently on Medium.com today, and speaks regularly at events worldwide.
Asim Hussain
Asim is a developer, author, and speaker with over 20 years of experience working for organizations such as the European Space Agency, Google, Microsoft, and now Intel, where he is the Director of Green Software. He's also the Executive Director and Chairperson of the Green Software Foundation a global industry consortium with a mission to create a trusted ecosystem of people, standards, tooling, and best practices for building green software.
Rémi Parmentier
Rémi Parmentier is a French front-end developer working at his own small web development agency, Tilt Studio. He loves to learn, and enjoys even more to teach.
This led him on a joyful quest to understand and demystify HTML emails coding. Rémi runs workshops, gives talks and writes articles on his blog to help others code better HTML emails. Rémi also likes collecting Game Boy consoles and listening to Sufjan Stevens.
Michelle Barker
Michelle is a Senior Front End Developer at Ada Mode, with an interest in green tech and creative coding. She is author of front-end blog CSS { In Real Life }, a writer for Smashing Magazine, Codrops and CSS Tricks, and a regular speaker on CSS topics. She has a background in illustration, and enjoys tinkering with code in creative demos and side projects, as well as helping others to fall in love with CSS.
- Talk
- Modern CSS Layout
- On the web
- https://css-irl.info/
Tejas Kumar
Tejas has been writing code since age 8. Since then, he has worked either full-time or contractually for Spotify, Vercel, G2i, and others, picking up things along the way. His jobs have been some mix of Individual Contributor (coding-heavy) roles, and managerial roles between companies.
Today, as Director of Developer Relations at Xata, he travels the world equipping and encouraging developers to do their best work, aiming to make the world a better place through quality software.
- Talk
- Digging into Virtual Scrolling
- On the web
- https://tej.as
Andy Bell
Andy Bell is a designer and front-end developer, based in the U.K. Andy has worked in the design and web industries for well over a decade and in that time, has worked with some of the largest organisations in the world, like Google, Harley-Davidson, BSkyB, Unilever, Oracle, Capita, Vice Media and the NHS.
Over these years, Andy has worked on both extremely large projects for huge organisations and tiny projects for small startups. This has given him a vast experience over a large variety of work.
Andy founded Set Studio—a creative design agency, based in the U.K, who believe progressive enhancement and inclusivity don’t get in the way of stunning visual design and apply those principles to produce truly responsive websites for clients.
dina Amin
dina Amin is a designer from Cairo, Egypt. She completed her B.A. (Hons) in Industrial Design in Malaysia. Although trained as a Product Designer, dina loves to explore the intersections between various disciplines.
In 2016, dina started a side project called 'Tinker Friday' on Instagram, where she combined her passion for product design and stop motion with her views on consumerism. In this stop motion series, dina shows people what's inside the countless things they throw away, in unusual ways. dina continues to tinker, making new items out of old ones, constantly telling stories and showing people things in a completely different way.
After discovering her love for stop motion, dina also founded "Tinker Studio", where she produces stop motion videos for diverse clients and companies around the world. Her work is one big bowl of all the things she loves. She has her own Skillshare course on Stop Motion.
- Talk
- Making by Breaking
- On the web
- https://www.dinaaamin.com
Ben Callahan
Sparkbox was founded in 2009 with a mission to build a better web. As President, Ben has helped lead and grow the organization while they work alongside clients like Gap, The Oklahoma City Thunder, and Stanford University.
He’s focused his energy most recently on developing a maturity model for design systems, articulating the anatomy of design systems, and chronicling his findings about workplace culture in the tech space. When not knee-deep in these explorations with others, Ben is a father, partner, poet, and home barista. His personal motto is, “Stay in learning mode” and this helps him to remember that every interaction is an opportunity to grow.
Mystery Speaker
Obviously, our Mystery Speaker is a bit of a… well, Mystery. In true smashing style, you can expect something wonderful. Make sure to set your alarm on day two of the conference, because you don't want to miss this.
Vitaly Friedman
Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and doesn’t like to give in easily. When he is not writing or speaking at a conference, he’s most probably running front-end/UX workshops and webinars. He loves solving complex UX, front-end and performance problems.
- On the web
- https://smashingmagazine.com
